System would integrate criminal justice info

Nancy Flake

Published
5:00 pm CDT, Monday, March 28, 2011

The criminal justice system in Montgomery County should make a major technological leap forward in the next few years by allowing all county law enforcement agencies, courts and the District Attorney’s Office access to the same information.

The county is looking at purchasing an integrated justice information system, priced at $6.927 million, by Tyler Technologies. A number of urban Texas counties, who are members of the Conference of Urban Counties, successfully use the system, Marshall Shirley, director of the county’s Communication Information Services, told commissioners Monday morning.

“Our focus is on integration across all agencies that deliver public safety,” he said. “It would deliver intelligence to all decision makers. We will have the right information to the right people at the right time to make the right decisions.”

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office started in that direction Monday when commissioners approved spending a little more than $1 million for the lease purchase of 185 laptop computers to be placed in patrol cars.

“Our computers are so old we can’t even put virus protection on them,” said Capt. Peggy Frankhouser, who oversees communications for the MCSO. “These will be the basis for our integrated justice system.”

The laptops will be assigned in the same way as officers’ two-way radios and will allow for faster field reporting, she said. They can be docked in patrol cars and then taken into MCSO offices to hook into the network for downloading reports.

“It will speed things up for us, the jail and for records,” Frankhouser said.

Fifteen counties participating in the CUC’s Integrated Justice Information System have saved a combined $31 million through discounted software license fees and other savings, according to the CUC’s website at www.cuc.org.

“Six million dollars is a lot of money,” County Judge Alan B. Sadler said. “We need to see where we can make cuts. Software’s come down, not gone up.”

The county also would have to join the Conference of Urban Counties, at a cost of $25,000 a month, to be able to get enhancements to the Tyler Technologies system.

The “money’s important,” Shirley said, “but the business requirements are the rule. There will be efficiencies across the spectrum.”

Some of the benefits to Montgomery County using the Tyler Technologies system will include more seamless integration of information not only across all the agencies in the county accessing it, but also information shared with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, local and regional police departments and other counties, according to information from Shirley.

The system will better ensure the integrity of the data, and it will minimize duplication of efforts, the information states. It also will reduce paperwork and free up officers by eliminating duplicate data entry.

“The difficulty is making sure we have a computer system that can do everything everybody needs,” said District Attorney Brett Ligon, whose employees use an MS/DOS-based system. “The systems don’t speak to each other.

“It’s long past time.”

A committee of officials from the departments that would use the system is studying what Tyler Technologies is offering, as well as checking what other vendors have available, Shirley said.

The committee will match the software against the processes and will “quantify the need to fill the gap in terms of time and money,” he said.

The committee hopes to have a recommendation to commissioners by year’s end. Once approved, the system should be in place in 24-36 months.